John Moore

Office Location:

Specialization:

Education:

PhD Fall 2013

Thesis/Dissertation

“Studies on Cambrian Small Shelly Fossils”

AdvisorSusannah Porter

Bio:

Award(s)

UCSB Regents Special Fellowship, 2007/08 & 2010/11

G.K. Gilbert Award, 2011/12

Research:

I'm a post-doc working with Prof. Susannah Porter. The oldest diverse communities of animals with skeletal hard parts were found in the Cambrian Period, beginning around 541 million years ago. The remains of these creatures are affectionately termed the small shelly fossils—a variety of spines, shells, plates, and tubes that can occur in great profusion in rocks from this time. Certain of these fossils may be recognized as the earliest representatives of major groups that still exist today, but many remain enigmatic, often representing long-extinct groups of bizarre appearance. I am studying several of these more problematic forms in an attempt to learn what these animals were like and how they fit into the evolutionary tree of life. Fossils I'm looking at come from China, Australia, and the United States; they include chancelloriids (animals that lived on the seafloor and were covered with tiny rosettes of spines, so that they looked something like barrel cacti), hyoliths (conical fossils that may or may not be related to molluscs), and other creatures even more obscure.